When comparing Kinvey vs Couchbase, the Slant community recommends Kinvey for most people. In the question“What are the best alternatives to Firebase?” Kinvey is ranked 2nd while Couchbase is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Kinvey is:
When you want to upload a file, you just create an object and initialize the file upload to the server (this is done asynchronously).
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Pros
Pro Asynchronous file uploading
When you want to upload a file, you just create an object and initialize the file upload to the server (this is done asynchronously).
Pro Provides a straightforward way of connecting their services
Setting up a backend for an app with Kinvey is very easy and takes minutes. All you have to do is sign up and through their graphical interface follow all the steps, which boils down to creating tables and identifying the type of data that is being stored.
Then you download the library, integrate it with your app and initialize the process with one single line.
Pro User registration is easy
User registration with Kinvey is pretty good and usually works without any problems. It's also very easy to use, you simply pass the username, password, email, etc. to the required method and register a callback that returns whether the registration was a success or a failure.
Same thing is done for login and logout as well.
Pro Open source
Couchbase and Couchbase Mobile are open source and released under the Apache License.
Pro Easy to implement N1QL queries
Pro Ability to run ad-hoc SQL like queries on realtime big data
Couchbase N1QL allows native SQL processing over JSON data with high performance indexing for low latency queries at scale.
Pro Easy sync protocol to mobile devices
The minimal code needed to pull data down to a device
Pro Available on Windows, Linux & macOS
Pro Ability to make predefined fast queries
With Couchbase you can make "Views" of data, which are practically predefined queries which are fetched with an O(1) algorithm.
Cons
Con Costs are eye-wateringly high
The free tier is not that generous and as soon as you trip the paid tier it costs you thousands a month.
Con The free plan isn't that good
Kinvey's free plan only includes the first 1000 users for free, 5 million push notifications (which admittedly, is pretty nice) and 2GB of storage.
Con Vendor lock-in
Con No model mapper for Android
Couchbase does not have a model mapper for Android built-in and out of the box, instead you will have to write your own from scratch.
Con Not Compatible with couchdb
Since version 2 the sync-protocol is no longer compatible with couchdb. This makes couchbase nearly worthless